Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does?

Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfs, Down’s Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Andrew Solomon documents ordinary people making courageous choices. Difference is potentially isolating, but Far from the Tree celebrates repeated triumphs of human love and compassion to show that the shared experience of difference is what unites us.

This book was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction and eleven other national awards. It was also the winner of the Green Carnation Prize.